A Funeral Was Held For Iceland's First Glacier Lost To Climate Change, It Was 14,000 Years Old.

To think, we've come this far...

Once upon a time, in 1901 in fact, Iceland's Okjökull glacier was an estimated 38 square kilometres. In just 40 or so years it had shrunk to just 5.

Post-2005, it was all but water. 

The year 2014 marked the loss of its glacier status.

This is not a singular event, as global climate change dictates ever-increasing temperatures the glaciers the world over will begin to feel the effects first. 

Within the next 200 years, all glaciers are expected to be gone. 

Okjökull was estimated to be at least 14,000 years old.

A team of dedicated documentary makers have created a memorial tribute to the glacier as a sobering warning of what this loss means for the future and for mankind. 

On Sunday the 18th of August, the team held a ceremony inviting the Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson who placed a plaque at the site of the now lost glacier.

"I hope this ceremony will be an inspiration not only to us here in Iceland but also for the rest of the world because what we are seeing here is just one face of the climate crisis," Jakobsdottir said. 

The ceremony even went so far as to issue a death certificate for the glacier.

The author of the memorial, Andri Snaer Magnason said:

"Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier.In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path.This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be doneOnly you know if we did it."

Along with this passage, the memorial also includes the number 415ppm CO2: the record level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere reached in May this year, the first time this has happened in human history. Many glaciers, in Iceland and elsewhere on the planet, are losing a huge amount of ice to a warming climate. With Asia's mountain glaciers rapidly melting and depleting the region's people of precious water resources, and with Antarctica alone losing 252 billion tons of ice annually, the onus is on us to do something.

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